Discretion, Cognition and Embodiment in Process: Days and Nights With 911 Dispatchers
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Citation Wang, Chi. 2017. Discretion, Cognition and Embodiment in Process: Days and Nights With 911 Dispatchers. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
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Discretion, Cognition and Embodiment in Process:
Days and Nights with 911 Dispatchers
A dissertation presented by
Chi Wang
to
The Department of Sociology
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of Sociology
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 2016
i © 2016 Chi Wang
All Rights Reserved
ii Dissertation Advisors: Michéle Lamont and Bart Bonikowski Chi Wang
Discretion, Cognition and Embodiment in Process:
Days and Nights with 911 Dispatchers
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation re-conceptualizes discretion, cognition and culture in
action as well as body and embodiment, investigating them through an empirical analysis
of data from three years of field work in a 911 communication center. This project
employs a renewed concept of discretion, as well as notions such as “the desired state of
mind,” “controlled empathy,” “foregrounding” and “visualization.” It considers the
nuances, dynamics and requirements in the bureaucratic classification process through the
Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, the division of labor within and without the
communication center, the status inequality and power dynamics in the network of public
safety professions, as well as the broader organizational and policy settings. Merging
literature on discretion, street-level bureaucracy, culture and cognition, emotional labor,
body and embodiment as well as conversation analysis, and analyzing ethnographic data,
this dissertation provides novel insights into modern-day organizations and criminal justice
system, as well as an in-depth and contextualized look into the process and consequence of
the work of the 911 communication system.
iii
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………v
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………xii
Chapter 1: Discretion, Cognition and Embodiment: Classification in Process
……………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 2: Re-conceptualizing Discretion:
Context, Status and Interactive Processes
……………………………………………………………………………………………..19
Chapter 3: “Desired State of Mind”
—Re-conceptualizing Culture and Cognition in Action
Through Emotions in Modern-Day Workplace
……………………………………………………………………………………………48
Chapter 4: Contextualizing the Body: Three-Way Disembodiment, Foregrounding and
Visualization ….………………………………………………………………86
Chapter 5: Conclusion ………………………………………………………………….116
Back Matter
References………………………………………………………………………………121
iv
Acknowledgements
At the end of this long journey of academic and personal growth, I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to the subjects in my field site whose names I am unable to reveal yet can never forget. Some of them retired during the three-year period of my research, others left for other jobs, but most of the forty dispatchers whose stories I have shared in this dissertation are still making jokes and saving lives at the very same police department where I spent my most exciting and rewarding time in graduate school. Without my 911 family’s constant support I would have not survived any of the setbacks in the past three years. Nor would I have been able to make it this far, finally writing the acknowledgement pages of my entire dissertation. I am also indebted to the directors of emergency communication department, who kept the doors wide open for me to this world of bravery and resilience, strength and kindness, whose meaning to my life has yet to be fully understood.
I thank my committee members—Michele Lamont, Bart Bonikowsi, Matt Desmond and
Jeff Sallaz—the best possible team of scholars I could dream of, for their guidance, patience and generosity. I am grateful to Michele for her years’ of re-defining the pinnacle of academic excellence in both advising and her own research. She has brought both depth and scope into both my academic pursuit and everyday thinking. My experience in her culture workshops, seminars and conference panels, as well as one-on-one meetings has been as transformative as eye-opening.
I am grateful to Bart for nurturing and supporting me in the purest form of altruism and professionalism. Words cannot deliver my gratitude to him—someone who has made me a
v better theorist and more rigorous analyst with his versatility in theories and methods, line- edited my drafts, spent half an hour just to help me with a chart, and always given me the most insightful advice in the nicest ways. He has always put his advisee’s work and concerns above his own, something that is not only rare, but has been made almost impossible by the climate of academe.
I thank Matt Desmond for his input as a dedicated ethnographer and creative writer. His ethnography class interested me in conducting participant observation, a profound shift in my graduate school career. I also thank Jeff Sallaz for being a wonderful co-author from whom I have benefited tremendously through our collaboration. I am very honored and proud to have published a journal article with a great talent whose work I have admired and enjoyed reading.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisors from early years—Yuan
Shen and Lin Cai—whom I have long come to regard as non-familial parents. I am blessed to have become their advisee, and continue to receive lasting, unconditional support from them. I feel fortunate to have befriended from the earliest days in graduate school Queenie
Zhu, Mazan Elfakhani, Anshul Kumar, Erika Cheng, Leslie Grothaus, Phillipa Chong,
Elena Agapie, Anna Shine, Kamy Davoudi, Arjun Nair, Aliakbar Daemi and Frederic
Gaston Hall, with whom I spent joyful time together on losing the game, making workout plans that would fail, massive unapologetic collective procrastination and all other unspeakable shenanigans. I still hope our “big house” plan will pan out one day. I also have had the luck to meet Suzanne Smith whose friendship with me dates back to the first year in Perkins Hall and who—being a friend in need in its finest definition—is still trying the best she can to help me at this very moment. I particularly appreciate her universalist
vi perspective and spiritual talent, something that I find extremely valuable. Jessica Matteson, whose office is filled with nice plants and seated an even nicer person, has managed for years to rescue me from all situations and problems humanly imaginable despite her ocean of daily tasks, and did the same even during the very day of submission of this document. I thank Sarine Der Kaloustian, assistant director of administration at Harvard Graduate
School of Arts and Science (GSAS) for her thoughtful and compassion for a complete stranger during my time of crisis. I am grateful to Garth McCavana and Patrick O’Brien,
Dean and Vice Dean for Student Affairs at GSAS, for their resourcefulness and responsiveness in dealing with my most urgent needs nearing the finish line of my career in graduate school.
I would also like to thank my friends from the department—Alison Denton Jones and
Matt Kaliner for sharing their experience going through dissertation, dealing with personalities and living in D.C. Alison and I were brought together by vegetarianism,
Buddhism, Chinese culture, Zumba classes, and a fair amount of good karma. I share Matt
Kaliner’s taste in indie-alternative music, which is as impressive as his secret sand castles.
Alison and Matt were in the same writing group with me, which also included Beth
Truesdale, Kristin Skrabut and Angela Maione. They almost served my second committee when I needed feedback the most, and I owe many thanks to their helpful and timely response. Carly Cohen, a wonderful ex-roommate and friend, offered company and kindred spirit home and abroad. The chain of coincidences that made it possible for us to hang out in both hemispheres is truly a blessing.
My roommates and colleagues—Yun Zhou and Fangsheng Zhu—made my time away from campus relaxing, fun and cozy. I will always recall my years at Beckwith Circle with
vii the greatest fondness. Xiaolin Zhuo, my favorite cat owner and foodie, has thankfully managed to insert happiness into some of the most mundane, repetitive days of graduate school with her bright smiles and fun trips. I thank Weihua An for our long conversations in his William James Hall office that helped me see the light during my most uncertain and clueless days in the program. Maocan Guo, Mo Chen, Letian Zhang and Yueran Zhang, whom I see more as brothers than colleagues, like Fangsheng, Yun and Xiaolin, are my brilliant, lovely on-campus siblings. I also thank my economist friend Yang Du for providing shelter during my toughest days and for our unlikely inter-disciplinary mutual appreciation. I thank the hard-core and proud new homeowner Qiusi (Stacy) Song for flying in the face of Asian female driver stereotypes. Qingyang Yuan, a bona fide Beijing local and the smartest and loveliest person I know, blessed me with her wealth of knowledge and her uncanny ability to comprehend the depth and complexity of human circumstances near and far, in time and space. I thank Li Sun, a talented architect and perfect listener, who has always been willing to make time for me from her long working hours to hear about my struggles. Jia Liu, one of the first Chinese natural scientists I befriended in graduate school, introduced me to a type of rational clear-headedness that I desperately needed yet have never managed to sustain. I thank Beiting Cheng—a well-read super girl at Harvard Business School—for her immediate instinct to save my life, grabbing my hand to escape with her when the elevator we were in started to drop. I thank my old friend and classmate Stacy Lianlian Zhang for her thoughtful and inspiring
Phoenix-themed gift to mend my broken heart. My college best friend—Runshu Jiang—a film director in a lawyer’s suits, has enabled me to feel safe to talk about all my vulnerabilities and uncertainties about myself, from which I have generated even greater
viii inner strength. Xiuli Jiang, an open heart and independent mother, has unintentionally strengthened my Buddhist beliefs with her gift to grasp Buddhist teachings from even the most unprepared preacher (me). Ying Zhang, a long-time friend and capable teacher, reached out her helping hand during times when I suffered from physical wound or emotional trauma. And I thank Karen Long for being an ideal cat-sitter and an honest friend who has shared her life experience similar to mine, which shaped her trajectory as well as our friendship. I thank my friend of 20 years Crystal Xue Yao for sharing childhood snacks, rides from school, birthday cakes, a house in London and trips to
Nantucket, France and Iceland. I thank my sister-in-law Xuemiao Wang for the insights from her experience of personal transformation and enlightenment, and all of her well wishes. I thank Hui Liu for her understanding of my deepest and longest troubles, as well as her unyielding efforts to fight back whenever life brings her down. My girl squad—
Yang Liu, Yuewen Liu, and Yu Sun—is the living example of long-distance friendship. I owe my emotional maturity to each one of them for our past decade of witty gossips, group travels and heart-to-heart conversations. I look forward to our mutual growth, and the denial thereof, for decades to come.
I wanted to shout out to my Chinese sociology community, organized and sustained by esteemed scholars Martin Whyte, Ezra Vogel and Ya-Wen Lei, who created a feel of home with tasty food and inspiring conversations for generations of Chinese scholars. My friends and colleagues from the department—Amy Cheung, Jasmin Sandelson, Asad.Asad, Matt
Clair, Aaron Benavidez, Siobhan Greatorex-Voith, and Holly Wood for their collegiality. I thank my singing teacher Elizabeth Eschen, for her sensitivity to the finest texture of my personality—which, after years of professionalization in graduate school, has become
ix foreign even to myself—and her magic power to channel every bit of it into musical sensibility. Suzanne Ogungbadero, Dotty Lukas, Nancy Bronco, Deborah De Laurell,
Odette and Binder and Lisa McAllister in the department of sociology have all my experience navigating the department smooth and easy, something I appreciate and do not take for granted.
I would like to thank members of Harvard Dudley Choir and Harvard Curling Club for giving me the opportunity to pursue my love for music and my curiosity about ice sports.
Kate Anderson, whom I met at the choir, kindly connected me to his father, Geoffrey
Anderson, who is a retired public prosecutor and police expert. I thank them for their interest in my dissertation and the help they offered.
Laurie Flaherty at the Department of Transportation, Gregory Rohde at E-Copernicus and
David Furth at the Federal Communications Commission provided helpful information for my dissertation and our meetings in D.C. were as informative as encouraging. I greatly appreciate their generosity with their time and suggestions. I also thank James Marshall at the 911 Training Institute for being an avid, persistent advocate for the 911 community.
I thank my two ethereal cats, maomi, and maoer, who are by no means related but look so much alike as if they were meant to be, for their surreal beauty, majesty and therapeutic power that has never failed to bring me utmost happiness.
At last, I want to thank my parents. My late father, Richun Wang, was a simultaneous
English-Mandarin interpreter at the United Nations. Not until I had started writing up my whole dissertation and using the word “translation” did I realize how much his job— wearing headsets, speaking two languages almost at the same time under tremendous stress, responding to changing circumstances in matter of seconds, taking shifts and leaving each
x with his shirt soaked—resembles what I found in my dissertation. I wanted to thank him in all languages possible for his guidance from heaven, yet no language could fully express my love for him and my unending sadness for his passing on March 17th, 2006.
I thank my mom, Daihong Wang, for everything in my life. In 2012 I had an endoscopy, and while I was lying in bed I thought of my childhood years spent in a hospital battling an innate heard disease. It was crystal clear to me, while staring at the wall of Cambridge
Hospital, that if I were to die, I could easily let go everything in my life and embrace the end of it except for her. I still feel the same way today, at this very moment. Her wisdom, strength, fearlessness, kindness and open heart give meaning to my life, and define my life in itself. She is the reason for both of my perseverance and detachment. She makes it possible for me to leap in both of my this-worldly and other-worldly pursuits. And I know, more than anything else, that we will be eternally bonded in both worlds.
xi
For Richun Wang and Daihong Wang
xii Chapter 1
Discretion, Cognition and Embodiment: Classification in Process
This dissertation re-conceptualizes and investigates discretion, embodiment and culture in action through the daily work processes and experiences of street-level bureaucrats within the structural, cultural and organizational context of 911 emergency response system. This research builds conversations with dominant approaches to cognition in action, street-level bureaucracy, and body and embodiment in the discipline, and seeks to contribute to respective literatures with grounded empirical investigations as well as renewed theoretical re-formulations. Based on ethnographic data from three years of fieldwork in the emergency communication center of a metropolitan police department, this dissertation proposes an interactive and contextualized perspective on the mechanisms through which discretion is practiced, cognition is acted upon and bodily actions are communicated and interpreted by individuals taking distinct structural, organizational and geographical positions. These individuals are conceptualized as simultaneously inter-connected and divided through a network of information technology and classification scheme. This research also highlights how both said network and classification scheme are provided by bureaucratic agencies imbued with power struggles and status inequalities.
Call interpretation and coding in the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system is the key process of the work of 911 emergency communication. CAD codes constitute the state’s classification system for the handling of emergency situations and the coding process. The work of 911 dispatchers is the work of connecting discretion with policy, cognition and emotion with organizational mandate, as well as remote bodily situations with visualized scenarios and expectations. In these various ways social reality and official systems of
1 classification are bridged by humans and their constant hard work, specifically in my case, emergency calls are understood and converted to codes in CAD. Research has shown how social reality “on the ground” tends to be complex, fluid, ambiguous, inconsistent, multi- dimensional, while its reconstruction as official representation is simplified, static, clear- cut and uniform (Bourdieu 1998; Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov 2004: Kluegel and
Smith 1981; Desmond and Emirbayer 2009; Fantasia 1995; Lamont 2000; Zerubavel 1997).
During this process of translation of “messy” reality into official categories, a timeless and absolute character is ascribed—through both human agents and technology—to information determined situationally, temporally and relationally; and fundamentally ambiguous and complex reality is transformed into clear-cut categories recognized and legitimized by an existing classification system. The overarching themes of classification and representation process, as well as the common structural, organizational and cultural context surrounding them underlie the three chapters that follow. Each chapter has a distinct theoretical angle and empirical focus in dealing with discretion, cognition in action, and embodiment, respectively.
Viewing the bureaucratic classification system as a set of organizationally-prescribed alternatives for street-level employees who interact with citizens during front-line service encounters and make decision based on individual situations on the ground, in Chapter 2 I re-conceptualize the notion of discretion as street-level bureaucrats’ relative freedom to choose among said alternatives. Formulated this way, discretion finds its roots in the character of a given organizational environment, rather than in the cracks in rules and regulations (Baldwin 1998; Bergen and While 2005; Dworkin 1977; Galligan 1996; Hill
2003; Hawkins 2003; Lacey 1992), or in the idiosyncrasies of values and beliefs (Kelly
2 1994; Maynard-Moody, Williams and Musheno 2003; Sobol 2010; Weissert 1994). With my empirical analysis of different levels of discretion found in 911 call-processing and their relationship with the status inequality and organizational structure of emergency response agencies, I provide a new interpretation of discretion and how it varies by call type in the 911 response process and what it can tell us about the structural characteristics of status inequality and power dynamics in street-level bureaucracies.
At the same time, I treat the bureaucratic classification process—coding 911 incidents— as a fundamentally human process in practice; thus, after a close look at the classification system itself as the bedrock of discretion, in Chapter 3, I move on to investigate the detailed coding process in practice with a focus on individuals’ cognitive and emotional experiences at work in. With the concept of “desired state of mind” I seek to theorize cognition as a joint product of intentional individual behaviors and organizational expectations and demands, with emotion as its indispensible part. Through my ethnographic data and findings, I show what the “desired state of mind” is in the context of
911 emergency communication and call classification, where it comes from, what its relationship with emotion is, how it is accomplished by individual 911 dispatchers, and how the ways in which they accomplish it are affected by the cultural and structural environment of emergency communication system and public safety professions filled with status disparities and power imbalances.
After examining the cognitive and emotional experience of street-level bureaucrats, I then turn in Chapter 4 to the role of the body in the classification process. Here, I focus on the mechanisms through which physically and spatially separate individuals with shared goals inter-subjectively communicate and interpret bodily situations to justify and initiate actions
3 as they carry out their jobs of responding to emergencies. I demonstrate the process in which deeply embodied experiences of being in an emergency situation are spoken about and understood across social actors who are not co-present (victims, callers and dispatchers), and ultimately converted into actionable categories in the official classification scheme that first aids responders or police officers will interpret in responding to calls. Through my empirical findings, I explicate two distinct processes— foregrounding and visualization—in order to show how emergency situations physically inaccessible to 911 dispatchers and their frontline colleagues are verbally described and interpreted, overcoming the spatial and sensory boundaries among the callers, 911 employees and front-line responders and accomplishing emergency response actions.
Though all examined through the process of classification of situations and incidents, these three topics—discretion, cognition in action and embodiment—are studied within distinct theoretical frameworks in connection with different scholarly traditions and schools of thought. Chapter 2 proposes an approach that diverges from two primary approaches to discretion, which I call legalistic and individualistic perspectives (Baldwin
1998; Bergen and While 2005; Dworkin 1977; Galligan 1996; Hill 2003; Hawkins 2003;
Kelly 1994; Lacey 1992; Maynard-Moody, Williams and Musheno 2003; Sobol 2010;
Weissert 1994). Replacing them with my own conceptual alternative—situated realism—I situate discretion in the organizational environment which street-level bureaucrats inhabit, defining discretion as the freedom to choose among organizationally-prescribed options.
Reviewing literature on public administration, criminology and street-level bureaucracy, I establish my theoretical framework though critiques of three major problems that I identify in previous studies: straw-man counterfactuals, assumed causality and partial context.
4 First, I highlight the relative and comparative nature of the concept of discretion, and how it is manifest in both legalistic and individualistic approaches. I argue that both perspectives construe theoretically misleading and empirically unrealistic “counterfactuals” in their definition of discretion: while the legalist perspective conceptualizes discretion from a legal ideal in which implementation in practice perfectly matches rules on paper, the individualistic perspective oftentimes compares bureaucratic rules with individual values and beliefs. Such straw-man counterfactuals are directly applied or indirectly measured in empirical research as actual alternatives in street-level behaviors without much sufficient substantiation or clear mechanisms. Second, I argue that both approaches make implicit causal assumptions in their very conceptualization of discretion. The legalist perspective tacitly attributes injustice and abuse of power to the lack of rules and the opening of opportunities for individual biases and oversight. The individualistic approach makes simplistic connections between mind and behaviors with their comparison of beliefs and actions, implicitly attributing patterns and problems in street-level bureaucracy to street-level bureaucrats’ individual characteristics. Third, I point out that both approaches tend to overlook the organizational and structural context of street-level bureaucratic agencies outside the immediate front-line interactions but also directly impact their daily service encounters and decision-making processes, and instead focus a lot more on the environment where street-level bureaucrats are in direct contact with citizens or broader, ecological characteristics, contrary to earlier works on discretion which call for attention paid to the intricacies and complexity of the organizations (Lipsky 1980, 2010; Lundman
1979). Building on these three critiques, I call for the study of discretion that not only takes into consideration its relative and comparative nature but also is based on a more
5 nuanced and comprehensive approach to bureaucratic agencies, street-level bureaucrats and front-line service encounters. This reconceptualization of discretion highlights the organizational context of 911 communication through CAD system as the source of discretion, interactive processes as that locus where discretion is exercised and realized, as well as status disparities as both a cause and consequence of discretion.
In chapter 3 I borrow from the toolkit and cognitive model in the theory of culture and cognition in action. I take issue, however, with the toolkit and cognitive approaches’ partial break from the Parsonian value-action chain. While the toolkit theory views actors as active agents making choices and frees them from internalized cultural beliefs that guide actors’ behaviors, it makes them reliant on the outside cultural environment. And while cognitive theory zeroes in on the cognitive processes within individuals’ bodies and minds, it resorts to a trigger-response model of cognition with an emphasis on the unconsciousness inaccessible to explicit individual awareness and inter-subjective empirical observation. Instead of seeing culture in action as a toolkit with strategies for practice from outside cultural institutions, or autonomous yet interconnected systems of cognitive faculty with distinct functions, I treat cognition as a result of intentional human efforts directed towards cognition itself, which I term “the desired state of mind”; and more importantly, in my framework both the “desired state of mind” and efforts made to accomplish it are fashioned by the social, organizational and structural context that social actors find themselves in. To that end, I review and borrow from the rich literature on emotional labor and emotion management which treats individuals’ emotional state as an outcome of conscious work and socialization in a given organizational context, ties such work to broader stratifying forces and highlights its self and other-directedness, in order to
6 connect it with the scholarship on culture and cognition. Through this theoretical hybrid, I maintain that emotional labor and emotion management is intentional and conscious self and/or other-directed altering of cognition and meaning-making process, with both individual and structural level consequences.
In Chapter 4 I borrow from both the phenomenological tradition on the body and embodiment, and the insights on time and space from conversation analysis. I argue that while most research of the body and embodiment seeks to transcend the Cartesian body- mind dualism, most research still focuses on the non-discursive facets of the body and ignores the importance of verbal communication of the body experiences and techniques.
Then I call attention to the importance of organizational context in the research of the body and embodiment. At last, I bring in the insights from conversation analysis to connect the verbal communication of the body and the organizational roles of specific bodies in a given institutional context, calling for a more integrative approach to the topic that attends to both the verbal representation of body techniques and bodily experiences and the organizational structures and identities.
This dissertation informs public understanding as well as policy-making regarding an important profession in a significant way. First of all, the findings of this research has helped set up an independent mental-health support program for 911 dispatchers that provides post-traumatic incident counseling service and stress-relief strategies. Some of the insights generated by this study will also appear in the first handbook available to national
911 community. Secondly, it will also contribute to the push for retirement equity of 911 dispatchers with other criminal justice employees on administrative as well as legislative levels—an issue of contest and debate since 1968 in the state of Massachusetts. Thirdly, it
7 helps bring dispatchers’ lived experience at work into the discussion—besides technological and financial concerns—during the upcoming national upgrade of 911 communication system, which enables videos, pictures, text messages and images from body cameras carried by police officers. The new system designed to incorporate common mobile phone features will certainly change the ways in which dispatchers process information and interact with citizens; and new sources of trauma and emotional stress will ensue. Last but not the least, this study demonstrates how the 911 system operates, what helps dispatchers decide on the nature of the situation and what kind of information is most important for an effective 911 response. In other words, it familiarizes citizens with the knowledge of the organization and operation of one of the most important and immediate sources of aid in the face of serious crises and emergencies in the United States—an organization that has been a black box for most citizens since the invention of the 911 number.
Site and Methods
The analysis is based on data from three years’ ethnographic fieldwork in an urban police department’s emergency communication center in the city of Parkton. There are thirty-five dispatchers divided into five groups with one supervisor in each group; there is also one director, one training supervisor and five trainees. I followed all groups, and observed and interviewed dispatchers, trainees and supervisors about their work process during day (7am to 3pm), evening (3pm to 11pm) and overnight shifts (11pm to 7am next day). In addition to access to the communication center’s work space and one-year shift schedule, I also had log-in account in their Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, my own dispatch station
8 with the same set-up with the dispatchers’—nine monitors and fourteen radio channels— plus a hear-only 911 line through which I listened to both the callers and call-takers during ongoing phone calls. I also obtained permission to follow their in-house training classes and on-site training process with copies of all training materials, as well as to listen to phone records of past calls of my choice. And because the dispatching and call-taking alternate within one shift and the same individuals can be a call-taker for half of a shift, and a police or fire dispatcher of the other half, in this chapter and the whole dissertation, I use dispatcher and call-taker interchangeably, unless I need to specify the division of labor within the communication center or highlight the specific dispatch line (fire channel 1, police channel 2, for example) or call-taking position.
In this project I focus on 911 calls. Calls through business or other non-emergency lines are not included. My data come from multiple sources: day-to-day actions in the center, interviews with dispatchers, supervisors and trainees, records of past calls, incoming calls, information from CAD (more details below), casual interactions in the operation room and dining area, use of training manuals and books, as well as other relevant documents and files from the media, the city, state court, and the state police. All names and addresses are altered for anonymity.
In the emergency communication center where I did my fieldwork, there are three separate sections in charge of different tasks. The fire side consists of two consoles which seat two fire dispatchers, who talk to the fire department if a fire dispatch command pops up on their screen. The police side has two consoles and two police dispatchers who dispatch and assist police officers. In the middle there are six consoles: four call-takers are sitting by the 911 line to answer incoming calls, and a supervisor oversees the whole room,
9 and a tactic position is provided for an additional person in case of unusual emergencies. I was placed at the tactic position.
The roughly three hundred CAD codes constitute the state’s classification scheme for the response of emergency situations and the coding process—assigning a category to the reported situation based on the understanding of the call—structures the center’s operation and largely determines the official actions. Codes are essential to the 911 response system.
When a call comes in, the call-taker determines the nature and type of the reported incident and then selects a code (incident type) in the CAD system; this code determines the information flow both inside and outside of the communication center as well as the response plan—the kind of help that is sent to the citizens. A police matter coded will automatically show up on the police side of the room where the police channels and police dispatchers are, a fire call will go to the fire side of the room with fire channels and fire dispatchers. A medical might appear on both sides, and although medical calls through 911 lines are processed by the call-takers in the emergency communication center, their dispatching take place outside of center (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 911 Communication System and CAD
10 A response plan is a code-based official action to citizens that varies greatly in number, size and kind of vehicles and personnel in police, fire and medical departments separately or jointly out of hundreds of possibilities; for most incidents types, response plans consist of certain combination of forces among six types of police vehicles, police officers of three different ranks, eight types of fire vehicles, firefighters of two ranks and two general levels of medical life support (see table 1).
Table 1. The Correspondence Between Incident Type and Unit Response Plan
It is a non-exhaustive but illustrative table of the correspondence between codes and their response plans. The cells with darker shades contain incidents of higher priority while the lighter ones are lower in the priority level. For vehicles, R means report car, S for sector car, PS for patrol supervisor’s car and on officers, P stands for regular police offer, SGT means sergeant, and LT is lieutenant. Take the first row for example, if an incident is
11 coded as “Domestic ” CAD automatically designates two report cars, two officers and sometimes an ambulance as the overall response to the scene. No fire units will be needed.
And if it’s coded as “Chest Pain D1”, then one engine truck and one squad will be dispatched. Codes and response plans carry life-and-death consequences and directly constitute official records and statistics on crime rates, police actions, fire incidents, medical emergencies that configure the city’s public safety history and profile.
During the fieldwork, I followed the incident information updates on CAD screens while listening to the phone calls, and I conducted interviews after the calls to learn why certain incidents are understood and coded in certain way. If I could not take notes of the whole conversation I later accessed the corresponding phone records. If there were any ambiguous or in-progress calls on which type changes are made, I traced the changes and asked the dispatchers for an explanation. I focused on the ways in which the dispatchers question, probe, and comprehend the callers during 911 calls and capture the nature of the situations reported. I asked them what clues they rely on to make judgments about the incidents and what makes them change their mind during the conversation, paying special attention to details that result in changes in the categories coded. I also studied the emergency communication center’s training manuals, textbooks, slides, trainee reviews, paper and on-online exams, and certification procedures to further investigate the skills and expertise required of 911 dispatchers.
For each call, I collected data as follows. I first listened to that call while the call-taker and caller were talking, and took note of both sides of the conversation. The caller would start to interpret the call, select a code he or she saw most fit and type into the CAD system if there was additional updates or information. I paid attention to the content, voice and
12 tone of both parties, and I also observed the verbal and non-verbal exchanges in the room among colleagues including what they said when the caller was on hold or the call-taker’s side was temporarily muted. After the call was over, there would be a new incident entry in
CAD with complete information on the call, including the code or what’s called “incident type” in the system, the time and length of the call, the location of the incident, the response plan and units to be dispatched (automatically generated in CAD based on the code and location), the dispatched units’ location and status, the name of the caller
(reporting person, RP), the name of the victim or suspect (suspect, SP), the name of the call-taker and the dispatchers who provided updates or background information, the file number, the notes of the call with additional information or updates that the call-taker believed necessary to put in and typed manually, and with a few automated messages containing the units change, firearm/license to carry and hazardous material information of the address entered , as well as the police reference number if a report was generated. I would type in all except identifying information into my computer and later would type in the ethnographic information on call communication and in-house interaction that I took by hand with its corresponding CAD messages.
In Chapter 2, I approach the operation as well as the variation of discretion in following ways: first, I provide detail information on the process through which fire, medical and police calls are processed. I show what type of technology is used, how the room is set up, what the division labor is and how the work with collaborating agencies is structured, what role the dispatchers and call-takers play in the emergency response process, what type of skills is needed for these different incidents and how such skills are trained. Second, I look at how standardized and scripted the input is for different calls—namely, during process of
13 converting different calls to codes, how much of the work can be automated and pre- determined by the CAD system and how much has to rely on staff’s interpretation, understanding and decision-making. Third, I show in detail discretion in fire, medical and police call-taking processes and focus on the interaction between call-takers and callers, and between staff in the communication center and responders on scene. To look at the relations of call-takers with the callers and their front-line colleagues, I focus on how such interactions mirror the tension and uncertainty over the selection on coding alternatives and ask, what is the dynamics between these parties? What is their communication like? What role do different parties involved play and how are the manifest in call communication?
What is the respective relationship between the call-takers, dispatchers and the corresponding police, fire and medical units? Secondly, I analyze the training processes on different types of calls, and through my interviews and observations of 911 dispatchers, I asked dispatchers what is required of call-takers and dispatchers as well as where their confusion and difficulty comes from, and what it says about the source of discretion. I also traced the type changes in CAD system and show in the findings section how much they are subject to incident progress and circumstances and why and by whom changes are made.
In Chapter 2, I use ethnographic data from the observation of 911 dispatchers’ daily work, the training process, and training officers’ meetings, as well as interviews with dispatchers, supervisors, training supervisors, and trainees to examine how citizens’ calls are translated into CAD codes and how and to what extent discretion is mobilized during the process.
In Chapter 3, I approach “the desired state of mind,” emotional labor and emotion management as follows. I first employ data on the daily workings of 911 system, the
14 characteristics and challenges of 911 emergency response and the data on typical calls to show why a particular state of mind is indispensible for the job. Second, I draw on training session and in-house guided practice data to establish what is “the desired state of mind” for the job, and how the instructors and training officers impart and supervise the trainees’ performance so that the latter adhere to the said emotional state, which I call “controlled empathy.” Through observation on call-taking, I analyze how the call-taking process requires both attachment and detachment, how controlled empathy plays out in practice, and how dispatchers interpret and estimate the callers’ emotional state as well as their intentions through the calls. I show how “controlled empathy” plays a key role in cognition and decision-making during a process that may have life-and-death consequences. I pay attention to both call-takers’ personal experiences and their empathetic understanding of the situations of the callers. Third, I investigate how the dispatchers control the feelings of the callers as well as their own to obtain informative details that allow them to make fast and accurate coding decisions, how they evaluate the callers’ emotional state during the calls and how that affects their coding choices, as well as how they detect and adjust to the callers’ true intentions behind the calls. With my data on interviews and observations both at work and off duty, I identify two emotional issues: relatable incidents and traumatic visualization. I also identify two strategies of emotion management: distancing and bad humor. Last but not the least, through court documents, historical archives and media data,
I show how the broader structural inequality and organizational culture impacts the specific ways in which the emotion is managed (or not managed) by 911 communication staff.
In Chapter 4, I demonstrate foregrounding and visualization with my data and analyze how dispatchers reconstitute and verbalize implicitly embodied information, transforming
15 it to transferrable and workable languages across space and organizations. I show how olfactory, auditory, visual and tactile experiences are articulated by the callers and interpreted and visualized by the dispatchers. I first use data on the call-taking and dispatching processes to show how callers communicate different bodily experiences and how call-takers understand them. Then I use interviews on dispatchers’ career paths, opinions about other departments and experiences working with them to show how the use of the body as a key instrument in the criminal justice system is tied to their organizational roles. I also employ information from court-documents, legal papers, budget proposals, media coverage to obtain information on dispatchers’ wage, retirement, union status as well as other forms of organizational recognition and support. In addition I analyze their radio communication with front-line law enforcement agents on fourteen active channels, their face-to-face interaction with them and dispatchers’ conversations about their front- line colleagues. I focus on how dispatchers’ work interacts with and is informally and formally perceived by others as well as themselves. I seek to answer following questions: how do dispatchers help the front-line responders to make timely and effective emergency response? How do dispatchers send the right help to the right place in the right way? Most importantly, how does the fact that the dispatchers are separated from both the callers and their front-line colleagues affect their experiences at work? I look at the foregrounding of embodied messages in relation to collaborating agencies—fire, police and emergency medical departments—as well as in a broader criminal justice system, to reveal how power and status are reflected and contested in 911 dispatchers’ daily work life.
In what follows, I first re-define discretion in Chapter 1 and explore its variation through a detailed analysis of the differences between medical, fire and police matter responses,
16 then I move onto the topic of cognition and culture in action in Chapter 2, conceptualizing
“the desired state of mind” and “controlled empathy” to introduce an alternative model of culture and cognition, and to shed light on the ways in which structural context affects what “the desired state of mind” is in a given setting and the ways in which it is achieved; then I explain how the necessary information regarding the body and bodily experiences is communicated across individuals beyond spatial boundaries, and how is it used to bring physically separate parties to the same space in the context of three-way disembodiment between the callers, the 911 staff and the front-line law-enforcement agents. Concluding remarks will be made at the end of the dissertation.
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18 Chapter 2
Re-conceptualizing Discretion: Context, Status and Interactive Processes
The topic of discretion as employed by street-level bureaucrats has been widely examined and debated for decades. Research in this area can be categorized along the lines of two primary approaches. In this chapter, I review and critique these two dominant perspectives, which I call the legalist and individualistic approaches. I propose a concept of discretion that attends more to the organizational context, in which it occurs, as well as to status inequality, and social processes. Conceptualizing street-level bureaucrats’ discretion as their relative freedom to choose among organizationally-prescribed alternatives, I show through my empirical analysis how discretion is both a cause and consequence of the structure of the workplace, the organizational configuration of bureaucratic agencies, the specific interpretive and interactive work processes on the job, as well as status and power relations among individuals who hold different positions.
First, I shall discuss research on discretion and make three theoretical critiques on the legalist and individualist approaches. Secondly, I point out the relative and comparative character of the concept of discretion, and show how both approaches treat discretion by constructing “counterfactuals” which are theoretically misleading and empirically unrealistic. While the legalist perspective conceptualizes discretion around highly hypothetical match between laws and behaviors, the individualistic perspective tends to contrast bureaucratic mandates with individual values and beliefs. Such straw-man counterfactuals are often directly applied or problematically operationalized in empirical research as actual alternatives in day-to-day street-level actions without any sound proof or specific mechanism. Second, I argue that the underlying causal assumptions found in both
19 approaches are counter-productive to generating new findings and making theoretical advancements. The legalist perspective—in its conceptualization of discretion—already attributes biases, injustice and abuse of power to a vacuum of rules and the presence of opportunities for individual prejudice and negligence. The individualistic approach—by contrasting individual beliefs with policies—draws simplistic links between mind and behaviors and thus tends to connect problems in street-level bureaucracy to workers’ individual characteristics such as identity, preferences and biases. Third, I revisit valuable theoretical legacies from earlier research on street-level bureaucracy and show how their important insight on the nuances and complexity of structural and organizational context and processes is missing in more recent literature, and thus should be brought back to the center of our scholarly attention. Recent research focuses on the “street-level” part—the immediate front-line interactions, places like neighborhoods, classrooms and welfare offices where such interactions take place, and the people present in these settings—while the “bureaucracy” part is yet to be fully explored. I argue that while discretion is practiced, it does not emerge at the moment of service interaction. Rather, one needs to look deeper and further into the structure and rules of the bureaucratic agencies, and their daily work processes to understand what discretion is and what shapes it. Based on my critiques, I propose a reconceptualization of discretion that maintains its relative and comparative nature but allows for a more comprehensive and nuanced look at bureaucratic agencies, their personnel and client-worker interactions. This conceptualization of discretion attends to organizational context, interactive processes as well as status disparities. After laying out my theoretical framework, I demonstrate the meaning and process of discretion through my analysis of the daily work of 911 dispatchers’ at the front-line of emergency
20 response. I show how the character of and variation in the levels of discretion—as evidenced in distinct modes of work responding to police, fire and medical incidents—is shaped by and reproduces the organizational context, service interactions and status structure in emergency communication system.
Current Theories of Discretion and Street-Level Bureaucracy
Discretion is commonly viewed as entailing the autonomy to make decisions and to act under given circumstances. For many, it has become equivalent with either the lack of constraints (Baldwin 1998; Bergen and While 2004; Dworkin 1977; Galligan 1996; Hill
2003; Hawkins 2003; Lacey 1992), or a conflict between rules and individual values and preferences (Kelly 1994; Maynard-Moody, Williams and Musheno 2003; Sobol 2010;
Weissert 1994). The majority of the research on this topic examines discretion through the work of street-level bureaucrats—employees hired to implement laws and policies who interact directly with everyday citizens (Lipsky 1980, 2010; Schram , Soss, Fording and
Houser 2009; Soss et.al 2001; Pavetti, Derr, and Hesketh 2003; Riccucci 2004; Riccucci and Meyers 2004). Focusing on the crucial moment of service encounter that has direct and consequential impacts on the individual citizens’ lives, interested scholars have approached discretion in street-level bureaucracy from two primary perspectives, which I call “legalist” and “individualistic”. The former follows the tradition of legal scholarship on discretion and problematizes the gap between rules and practices, which is deemed as the source of injustice, inefficiency and innovation (Davis 1969; Hawkins 2003; Maynard-
Moody, Musheno and Palumbo 1990). Studies in the field of public administration often take this approach, using terms like “compliance” and “enforcement” to examine how rules
21 and standard procedures are carried out by staff on the ground, with comparisons made between policies and implementation (Braithwaite 2006; Brown and Duguid 1991;
Goodrick and Salancik 1996; Axelrad and Kagan 2000; Orr 1996; Schneiberg and Bartley
2008). The individualistic perspective focuses on how values and characteristics of street- level bureaucrats’ affect their decisions and behaviors on the front line, a popular theme in criminal justice literature. Seeking to draw links between individual characteristics and broader patterns in decisions-making and actions, scholars’ attention has focused on to how demographic factors such as gender (Rabe-Hemp 2008; Meier and Nicholson-Crotty
2006), age (Brown, Novak and Frank 2009) as well as cultural factors such as beliefs and values (Bergen and While 2004; Kelly 1994; Sobol 2010; Weissert 1994) influence decision-making and behaviors of street-level bureaucrats such as arrests, reports and punishments.
Despite their distinct foci, both approaches treat the notion of discretion in a relative and comparative way—that is, there is an underlying null-hypothesis of “how things could have been” or “how the work should be done ideally”—from a legalist perspective, it is the compliance of rules and laws by street-level bureaucrats who implement the former exactly the way they were intended, and from an individualistic perspective, it is the decisions and actions untainted by individuals’ idiosyncrasies. While I sympathize with the concerns of social justice and public accountability that commonly motivate these lines of research, I take issues with the way in which discretion is conceptualized. Many have pointed out that there is always a gap between laws on paper and laws in practice which is open for individual interpretation and judgment (Bittner 1973, 1990; Silbey 2005; Silbey and
Bittner 1982; Suchman 1997; Trubek 1984; Valverde 2003), and that there are always
22 numerous constraints on behaviors besides stated rules and policies (Campbell 1999;
Lacey 1992). More importantly, I argue, because discretion is theorized against such
“straw-man” counterfactuals which can hardly be found in reality, it is difficult to examine empirically how, when and whether it varies, is lacking or absent; and that is why in current scholarship, decision making and actions and the lack thereof, as well as compliance and non-compliance, can all be instances of “discretion” (Nickels 2007). A concept that can be operationalized as one thing as well as its opposite is perhaps confusing. While an alternative conceptualization of discretion should still maintain its relative and comparative nature, the viable counterfactuals and alternatives that constitute discretion should arguably be derived from specific, actual social situations.
Moreover, both approaches—because of where they place their theoretical and empirical focuses—already have drawn tacit causal links that explain street-level bureaucrats’ behaviors at the very beginning. By looking at the constraints on behaviors, or individuals’ characteristics and beliefs, the attribution of problems in street-level bureaucracy such as injustice, inefficiency, or abuse of power is inevitably made to either the lack of organizational control on people, or people’s own flaws and misjudgment, only a matter of who, when and how. However, as has been reviewed and acknowledged by many, the results of studies that attempt to explain behaviors through individuals’ characteristics are contradictory and inconclusive at best (Brown et al. 2009; Rabe-Hemp 2008; Varano et al.
2009). What is more, scholars have to yet to pinpoint exactly which values and beliefs contribute to more or less compliance and enforcement, not to mention that such a value- action model of the relationship between mind and action is questionable in the first place.
In fact, it has been proved since decades ago, that institutional environment should be
23 given at least as much weight as individual characteristics when looking at discretionary behaviors, and that the priorities and intensities of different factors shaping discretion are shaped by the structural and cultural context of specific organizations (Lundman 1979). In his research on police behaviors on traffic violations, Lundman found that individual officers actually tend to be less biased against minorities responding to traffic law violations when there is less organizational constraint. And while concluding that the gender of officers does affect the patterns found in policing, and women’s “ethics of care” might be the explanation for female officers’ lower likelihood in the use of extreme controlling behaviors such as search and arrest, Rabe-Hemp (2008) also acknowledges that female officers are also more likely to be assigned to certain tasks, which have an impact on the observed gender differences in police responses.
Although many of the abovementioned studies attend to the broader context that street- level bureaucrats are embedded in, such context tends to be where street-level bureaucrats interact with their clients—offices, streets, neighborhoods, hospitals, schools and so forth, but not the agencies and organizations that the former inhabit. The insufficient attention paid to the organizational context is an unfortunate development of Lipsky’s (1980, 2010) legacy, whose powerful analysis of the intricacies of the structure of street-level bureaucracy could yield important insights to policy implementation and front-line public service. Discretion does not emerge or is produced during the service interactions, rather, it comes from the organizational structure and context independent from specific individuals, but is practiced and brought to life at the moment service counter by said individuals during interactive work processes on the street-level. The organizational structure and context not only include the ways in which work is assigned and organized, but also the
24 social relations, status and power dynamics among different personnel taking different positions in a network. Halliday et al.’s (2009) research on pre-sentence social inquiry reporting in Scotland has shown, for example, how the reports were written as an instrument for the social workers hired to assist judges to obtain recognition and status, as a result of the former’s uncertainty over professionalism and credibility. And such a motive undermines the objective of said reports in social inquiry. And Dubois’ (2016) important work on French welfare system brings in the organizational dimension. It demonstrates how broader socio-economic inequalities such as class, race and gender as well as difficulties in citizens’ most private and personal lives such as divorce and childcare are translated into administrative terms, which are presented and evaluated at the moment of specific service encounter by individuals bearing different identities and transforming both public sphere and private spheres. The relationship and exchange between collaborating agencies or hierarchical ones should also be considered for a fuller understanding of the discretion of street-level bureaucrats. For example, in reviewing
Pepinsky’s (1984) research on police discretion, Nikels’ (2007) pointed out that one key finding from Pepinsky is that police officers’ sense of autonomy is an “illusion” because
“ the ‘decision’ to file a report or not was overwhelmingly determined by whether or not the dispatcher named an offense in their call to the officer, one that could be corroborated on the scene.” (Nickels 2007, p.574) Therefore, police officers’ discretion is constrained by the “structuring force introduced by their reliance on the dispatcher’s choice of wording in selecting to file a report.”(Nickels 2007, p.575) Building on my critiques and borrowing similar insights on constraints and alternatives specific to an organizational context and a set of social relations, I will further elaborate on my conceptualization of discretion and lay
25 out my theoretical framework more fully in the next section.
Context, Status and Interactive Processes: Towards a Cultural Sociology of Discretion
In their important work on sentencing reform in the war on drugs, Engen and Steen (2000) take an approach to discretion similar to that which is employed in the abovementioned discussion on how police officers’ choices are limited by information from the dispatchers.
Interested in the impacts of the changes in the sentencing guidelines on convictions and sentencing practices on drug offenders in Washington state, Engen and Steen focus on whether and how the organizational processes shape the link between the changes in sentencing guidelines brought about by the reform and the sentencing outcomes. They found that the reform brought significant changes in the sentencing process through discretion. Discretion, in their case, is the pool of options judges and prosecutors have in making their sentencing decisions. The reform limited the available alternatives for sentences in various ways, and as a result, the sentences have become much more predictable by the type and severity of charges that the prosecutors have filed or pled to.
The authors raised two important points, the first is that in their case discretion comes from legally and organizationally available options, and that changes in the kind and number of said options affect discretion; and second, discretion is relative and comparative in a sense that it is tied to status and power structures in a given network and can be empirically observed. In their case, the reform has greatly increased the prosecutors’ discretion because of how charges can predict subsequent sentences, and simultaneously reduced the judges’ discretion because of the now highly limited room for them to choose between possible sentencing options. The authors further examined structured sentencing options with other
26 empirical cases unwarranted sentencing disparity, treating them as “windows of discretion”
(Bradley-Engen et al., 2003, p.99).
Building on my critiques and borrowing from the alternative view of discretion conceptualized in relation to options available and organizational context, here I propose what I call a “situated realism” approach as an alternative to the “legalist” and the
“individualistic” ones to make the presence, absence as well as its variation empirically observation, consistently operationalized and situated in actual realistic scenarios instead of theoretical ideals. In order to do so, I re-conceptualize street-level bureaucrats’ discretion as their relative freedom to choose among organizationally-prescribed alternatives, which allows for empirical investigations of its presence, absence and variation in relation to the daily work process within the context of the bureaucratic organization imbued with power and status shifts and struggles. My approach focuses on the social processes through which street-level bureaucrats navigate and choose among organizationally available options, and how the organization with structurally unequal status positions and categorically different tasks shapes the ways in which said bureaucrats’ discretion is practiced in the dynamic, interactive and ongoing encounters with average citizens and clients.
Having established my theoretical framework with the concept of discretion at its center,
I shall analyze my findings in the next section. Through the data from fieldwork in a 911 emergency response center at an urban police department, I show what discretion means in this context, how it varies by the broad type of incidents from little to plenty — medical, fire and police — due to the organizational structure and the specific work processes, and how it is affected by the existing power and status dynamics within and without the
27 organization—the high level of discretion in police dispatch is faced with clashes with police officers on the street who possess higher position and authority in the organizational system, while the interactions with fire and medical departments are less contentious.
Findings
In this section, I identity three distinct levels of discretion as defined by the dispatchers’ free and improvised choices among available codes. For each, I will first describe the technical and organizational setup in place, then I will detail the specific call-taking practices within said setting, focusing on the role of the human staff, their interactions with the callers, as well as the formers’ leeway in making the crucial coding decisions. Then I will look at the broader relations in the organization and show how distinct levels of discretion allowed for the dispatchers are intertwined with the status struggles and power plays with their front-line colleagues in collaborating agencies.
Discretion: Codes, Coding, and the Work Processes